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The Decadent Pop Music Film: Politics, Psychedelia and Performance

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The British Pop Music Film

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Abstract

The year 1966 was the first of the lean years for British pop music films. In Hugh Gladwish’s musical comedy The Ghost Goes Gear, the Spencer Davis Group’s manager (Nicholas Parsons) holds a pop festival to finance his ancestral haunted house. The group were scared enough to disappear halfway through while the producers were so terrified they truncated the movie and released it as a supporting short to One Million Years BC (Don Chaffey, 1966): an apt pairing since critics found the ‘embarrassingly artless affair … uncomfortably reminiscent of the “quota quickie”’.1 Of pop’s prime movers only Cliff Richard and the Shadows turned in appearances. Cliff Richard Junior, ‘the biggest star in the universe’, made a cameo appearance in David Lane’s Thunderbirds Are Go, described — a touch harshly — by Mark Kermode as Cliff’s finest film performance.2 However, oblivious to the advances of Lester, Boorman and Anderson (Gerry or Lindsay), Cliff again teamed up with Robert Morley to relive the innocent scheming of The Young Ones in Sidney Hayers’ Finders Keepers. The film is generally seen as marking a low ebb in Cliff’s filmography (as would Richard Lester’s identically titled train-set comedy-thriller of 1984) but it still ranked as the year’s top musical.

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Notes

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  1. Stephen Glynn
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© 2013 Stephen Glynn

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Glynn, S. (2013). The Decadent Pop Music Film: Politics, Psychedelia and Performance. In: The British Pop Music Film. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230392236_4

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